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University of New South Wales

This shows models of halloween skeletons lit up with neon lights

Featured Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles Psychology

·March 10, 2021·6 min read

I Ain’t Afraid of No Ghosts: People With Mind-Blindness Not So Easily Spooked

Horror writers may have a hard time attracting those with aphantasia to read their spooky stories. A new study reveals those with aphantasia, a disorder marked by an inability to visualize mental imagery, have a hard time getting spooked by creepy stories. Findings suggest mental imagery may have a closer link to emotional processing and expression than previously believed.

Featured Neuroscience Psychology

·December 15, 2020·4 min read

Hallucinations Induced in Lab Could Be Key to Better Understanding and Treatment

Inducing hallucinations using visual stimuli in a lab setting enables more objective and reliable testing.

Featured Open Neuroscience Articles Psychology

·November 22, 2020·4 min read

Stereotypes Prejudice Our Musical Tastes

Emotional response to music isn't just derived from lyrics or the beat, they are also based on preconceived ideas we have about different musical genres.

Featured Neuroscience Visual Neuroscience

·August 14, 2020·6 min read

Why the Brain Is Programmed to See Faces in Everyday Objects

Face pareidolia, the phenomenon of seeing facelike structures in inanimate objects, is a perceptual phenomenon that occurs when sensory input is processed by visual mechanisms that have evolved to extract social content from human faces.

Featured Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles Visual Neuroscience

·June 22, 2020·5 min read

Being ‘mind-blind’ may make remembering, dreaming and imagining harder

Aphantasia, a disorder in which people are lack the ability to mentally visualize imagery, is also associated with a widespread pattern of changes to other important cognitive processes. Many with aphantasia report a reduced ability to recall past events, imagine the future, and dream.

Featured Neurology Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles

·May 16, 2020·4 min read

Certain Memory Complaints Predict Future Dementia

Subjective cognitive complaints may be the earliest detectable stages of preclinical dementia.

This shows a woman surrounded by various objects like clocks and smoke

Featured Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles Visual Neuroscience

·May 6, 2020·6 min read

How strong is your mental imagery? It might depend on how ‘excitable’ your neurons are

The strength of a person's mental imagery is associated with excitability in the prefrontal cortex and visual cortex. Highly excitable neurons in the visual cortex may reduce a person's ability to imagine mental images. The findings shed light on how aphantasia, a condition where a person can not imaging mental images, may occur.

Featured Neuroscience Open Neuroscience Articles

·May 5, 2020·3 min read

People aged 95 and over show stronger brain connectivity

Superagers, people aged 95 and older, showed more activation between their left and right frontoparietal control network in their brains than their younger counterparts. The superior connectivity contributed to better performance on visuospatial cognitive tasks, a new study reports.

Featured Neuroscience

·April 2, 2020·5 min read

Newly discovered memory process influences decision-making

Memory encoding processes important for decision making begin in the basolateral amygdala. The basolateral amygdala then creates cellular memories in the nucleus accumbens. The findings shed light on the learned connection between stimuli and reward.

Featured Genetics Neuroscience

·March 20, 2020·3 min read

Worldwide Study Unlocks Genetic Secrets of the Gray Matter

Researchers have created the first genetic map of the cerebral cortex, which identifies over 300 genetic variants that influence the structure of the brain region.